Courtside: Photographs by Bill Bamberger

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
2001 Campus Drive
Durham, NC 27705

On view January 26–May 13, 2018

Exhibition Opening and Gallery Talk: Friday, January 26, 2018
5:30 to 7:00; Gallery Talk at 6:00

Charter school playground, Harlem, New York, 2007.

From Maine to Florida, Rwanda to Mexico, a basketball hoop indicates a place where the sport is played and where communities and relationships are built. As a vital element within a community, the hoop becomes an integral part of each location’s unique narrative. In these highlights from his Hoop series, photographer Bill Bamberger places the viewer courtside to a variety of cultures and landscapes.

Bill Bamberger, a Durham resident and instructor at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, began photographing basketball hoops in 2004. The first photograph in his Hoop series, Rental House, Nags Head, North Carolina, is on display in this gallery. The entire series spans thirteen years (2004 – 2017) and includes thousands of photographs from thirty-eight states across the U.S. and nine countries worldwide.

With images of urban and rural, active and abandoned sites in the U.S. and around the world, Courtside presents seemingly disparate places side by side. Each made in a different geographic location, the selected photographs demonstrate the ability of a hoop and court to reflect and reveal the people who use and create them. In this series, Bamberger gives viewers a front row seat, a perspective that is at once familiar and fresh, from which to see and recognize our common world.

This exhibition is organized by students in the Nasher’s first Curatorial Practicum class as part of Duke’s Undergraduate Concentration in Museum Theory & Practice: Janie Booth, Savannah Chauvet, Jessica Chen, and Brittany Halberstadt. All photographs are courtesy of Bill Bamberger.

Church Playground, Kinihira, Rwanda, 2013.